Overview of Previous Work
Wendy Stockley, Environmental Manager for Hondaís twoOhio-based automobile manufacturing plants, was about to be visited by Mr. Suzuki, the most senior environmental official from Honda headquarters in Japan. The company had recently taken a strong interest in certification under the new ISO 14000 environmental management standards. Suzuki had asked Stockley to evaluate the environmental practices of the Ohio plants in light of the ISO standards. In particular, he was interested in whether lean production practices, the cornerstone of Honda’s high-quality manufacturing operations, were helping to achieve environmental performance or whether they were a hindrance.

Although the manufacturing plants of other automobile companies in the United States had explicitly designed their environmental policies around federal and state regulations, Honda had tried to design policies that followed from, and were integrated with, its lean production philosophy. These policies were generally more flexible than traditional approaches and focused more on the end goal of efficiency than on meeting regulations. Stockley hoped to find the Honda approach better adapted to the ISO 14000 standards because of these characteristics.
To respond to her charge, Stockley had gathered data on the environmental management and performance at the two Ohio-based Honda plants, East Liberty and Marysville. She had also obtained data from her associates on the plants’ general productivity, quality performance, and environmental regulatory compliance. Further, she hired consultants to compare Honda’s U.S. environmental practices to those of their main U.S. transplant competitor, Toyota.
Upon Investigation, the standards appeared to be fairly flexible in their implementation. Nonetheless, issues of concern remained.

ISO 14000 was designed to focus on environmental